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Friday, June 08, 2007

SILLY WORDS

I have a habit of using silly words. Here are some of my favorites to use.

Cow-Orkers. This came about from the long ago Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban. I used to lurk in that group a lot. This is back in the day when the loudest personality didn’t ruin discussion groups – usually – so there were some delightful conversations and threads that I often learned things from. The newsgroup was populated with extremely clever people and tons of lurkers. But it was also populated with people that were extremely pedantic about spellings. A few famous misspellings gained popularity in the group though. For example someone wrote voracity when they meant to write veracity and from then on it became a running joke to use voracious or voracity to refer to how much truth something had in it. A second famous misspelling was cow-orkers instead of co-workers. I was so amused by that one that I’ve used it ever since.

My kids are a great source of silly words that I like to use. Especially my youngest one. He doesn’t always pronounce his words correctly and some of the mistakes are just awesome. He mispronounces my sisters name in such an amusing way that I always us it now.

One of my favorites from him is how he says girl. It sounds like grill. When ads for dolls come on during Saturday morning cartoons he says things like “I hate this grill stuff”. Heh. It’s awesome. I don’t use this all the time but I use it around my kids a lot. I’m totally amused by it.

He also says wirld instead of world. It reminds me of the Knights of the Dinner Table wurld. I like wirld better though and have a tendency to use that as well.

I picked up a few odd ones on my mission. I went to South Africa and since the history of that land was heavily influenced by British settlers (and Dutch but their words are in Afrikaans and don’t get used as much in English). Anyway, I have a tendency to say flat instead of apartment and boot instead of trunk. I just like the way they sound and (WARNING INSIGHT INTO MY HEAD COMING) I like being different or special and using words like that feels different and even a little special.

One of the funny Afrikaans words was the way they say sure. Instead of a word for sure it’s literally “Yes No” to mean OK, sure. The first time someone said that to me I turned to my companion and said “Well, which one is it?” He just laughed and led me inside the house we had just been invited into. I don’t use that much except for in my head. It way confuses people in America to say Yes No.

There are lots more but if you ever hear/read/see/observe/whatever me using an odd word now you know why.